We highly encourage submissions promising to significantly impact society, especially those leveraging AI. We anticipate compelling competitions attracting an extensive blend of interdisciplinary and diversity to our ICAIF 2025 competition track.
Technological advances in our field hold potential adverse effects on varying sections of society. We welcome proposals aiming to address such issues, particularly from researchers who identify with such communities.
Our focus is on the impact of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in finance. The competitions will challenge participants to achieve the highest score on a machine-learning task pertinent to the ICAIF community. This task will revolve around a specific problem and associated data provided by the competition’s organizers. A live component like leaderboards is recommended but not mandatory.
Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Blockchain, cryptocurrency, quantum AI & ML systems
- Forecasting financial scenarios
- Portfolio construction
- Risk modeling and management
- Asset pricing
- Robustness and uncertainty quantification
- Validation and calibration of financial models
- Application of Foundation Models in financial trading
- Graph theory and network analysis
- Fraud detection for credit cards and mortgages
- Early detection of firm defaults
- Explainability, ethics, and fairness of AI & ML systems
ICAIF 2025 will be a physical conference featuring a dedicated Competition Track. Participants and organizers will present and discuss the results. The Competition Track is presently planned as a live event with hybrid support spanning 3-4 hours. More information on the organization will be shared in the forthcoming months
Proposal Submission
We will accept a maximum of 4 pages per submission to lighten the load for our reviewers. We will follow a first-come, first-served model and accept compelling competitions on a rolling basis.
Submit your competition proposal via the link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICAIFWTC2025 by choosing “Competitions” in the drop-down menu. Proposals must be submitted as a single PDF file.
Review and Selection Process
Each proposal will be reviewed and scored based on factors like:
- Task(s): Impact, originality, and relevance to the ICAIF community. Tasks that provide positive societal impacts are strongly encouraged, though other subjects relevant to the ICAIF community are also welcome.
- Evaluation Protocol: Feasibility of the chosen task, adequacy of data for training and testing algorithms to solve the proposed task, soundness of the evaluation criteria, and clarity and fairness of competition rules will be evaluated.
- Logistics: The competition timeline, strategy for attracting competition participants, and the experience and diversity of the organizers will be considered. A detailed plan for recruiting competition participants will be crucial during the review process.
Important Dates (Anywhere on Earth)
- Competition proposal submission deadline:
July 21, 2025August 03, 2025 - Acceptance notification:
August 04, 2025August 15, 2025 - Competition track: November 15-16, 2025
Additional Comments
Competition organizers should offer a timeline for conducting the competition to guarantee participants have enough time to submit high-quality entries. Organizers requiring assistance or suggestions concerning competition platforms for executing the competition can contact the competition chairs for guidance.
Competition Chairs
- Fuli Feng (University of Science and Technology of China)
- Kunpeng Zhang (University of Maryland)
Contact: competitionchairs@icaif25.org
ACM ICAIF'25 